Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

I’ve found traction in the past by breaking things (potentially brainstorming) down along 3 different lines:

1. Strategy
I’ve positioned strategy as a practice of business modeling/client positioning that might span several experiences. The specific brainstorming question have been: What are the business needs of the client? To what general audiences are they trying to serve/sell stuff too?

2. Information Architect and/or Content Development
What are the needs of the content this experience will host? What content exists? What content needs to be developed?

3. User Experience
Who is actually going to use/visit this experience? What are they looking to get out of it? On a near individual basis, how much do we need to incite them to do what the client wants them too?

I realize that I’ve made some gross generalizations above, but as a digestable/non-threatening way of introducing UX in an agency setting, this approach has worked for me in the past.

Hi, Ross…I think it is great that you’re attacking this challenge!

I agree with much of what Dakota has jotted. If you’re at a pure traditional agency attempting to do digital, then yes you will run into issues. That means that the full-blown heuristic analysis of client sites may not really contribute to a realistic scope of services your agency will be able to sell through to the client.

One thing that has worked well for me is to let the brainstorm go where it may. Then once a few strong candidate creative concepts emerge, begin to gently challenge the team to think about what mindset you’re trying to evoke with the concepts. After that, nudge people to think empathetically about what people might want to do as a result of this new mindset.

What all of this does is helps you guide a team toward a conversation about tasks. Then you can really get your UX on and communicate clearly that as the user advocate on the team, you will be looking for appropriate task affordances and aids in ongoing design reviews.

It is a common state of affairs that you will probably have to apply most of your UX thinking after much of the concept/design is baked. Also, don’t try to be too aggressive with how you’re supporting tasks. Try to keep it limited to one or no more than three key interactions. If you try to focus on more than that, you’ll focus on none of it.

Most of all, don’t get too gung-ho about UX. Creatives will hate you for it. Make sure that they understand you’re there to provide guidance that will make the product better, not box them in creatively.

There’s an old story about department store owner John Wanamaker who did so much advertising that one day someone asked him whether it worked or not. His answer, according to advertising lore, was “I know that half of my advertising works. I just don’t know which half.”

Clients want to know that their advertising dollars are working, and the web affords opportunities to measure this stuff like never before. That’s the strategy I’d go with. Be the person who identifies or at least articulates clear objectives for the projects you work on.

For a given microsite, for example, you need to be clear about whether the objective is to drive sales, to drive awareness, to deepen loyalty, etc. Then, with the objective clearly articulated, your job is to identify and remove possible points of friction between users and that objective. This might mean making sure the calls-to-action are obvious, clearly labeled, placed at appropriate points in the “narrative” and easy to complete.

You will add value by focusing on what your clients are most concerned about – getting the most out of their advertising bucks. But you need to show value as a “tactical” contributor before your colleagues see you as a strategic one. If you demonstrate that you can help the team articulate a clear objective for each project you work on, and if you can make a specific tactical contribution to the product without stepping on the creatives’ toes too much, then you will find yourself in very high demand.

Finally, I agree with Michael’s advice. Don’t get too gung-ho or dogmatic about UX. Creatives will hate you, and they will be somewhat justified. There’s a long history and some pretty rigorous science behind things like market segmentation and message development, so you can’t be too pushy about things like personas without respecting your colleagues’ expertise with what they might view as similar or superior tools.

If you really want participate in a process that’s more UX-driven, then you’re probably not at the right kind of company.

Hi, @all. Thx that you’re taking up this question – from agency to agency I had and have again and again the same fight. I agree to all intents and purposes of what you has noticed – one or two were new to me – I’ll have a try.
My ultimate attempt is broaching the topic ROI. Adaptive Path has just released this interesting report about ROI (http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/reports/businessvalue/). It supplies frameworks and analysis that will help us to:
_ appreciate how to choose high-value, high-impact web development projects
_ evaluate investments in the context of the budget
_ plead in favour of UX as a competitive advantage

A few thoughts on this …

one, all agencies are working towards a similar end game, but they typically have a stategic, creative bias … some start with a hypothesis about what is right for the biz (brand), some the user, some what is technologically possible. I’d argue that the more enlightened agency values the biz (brand), user AND technology with comparable emphasis.

second, UX lives at the intersection of biz(brand), user and technology. When we are working within an organization that is under-serving one, we are left to compensate for the organizational short-comings.

third, and to the original question, identify where there is a short-coming, don’t argue for one view of the world over the other (or you are equally at fault), but a move to the middle – at the end of the day, the product that results from a deep understanding of each will benefit all.

Easier said than done!

One way of helping traditional agencies think differently is by getting them to recognize and tap into the wealth of tools they usually have access to in their research/strategy department, to which some of us in smaller digital agencies don’t have access.

For example, I think most traditional agencies tend to look to Neilson’s @plan to “see what the audience is doing online.” Well, @plan is intended to provide insight into media buy. It answers the question of “where” – not “what.” For example, @Plan tells us a target “read or contributed to a blog in the last month”. Really consider that – it is really just answering “where.” Blogs. Well, reading and contributing are really different behaviors.

Running Forrester social technographic data against your target may not be perfect either (it is getting better), but at least it attempts to separate behaviors (posting to blogs separate from consuming blog content, for example). See if your traditional team can run this data against the target early, and identify richer behavioral insights early on.

Helping them to ask what and how, not just where, as early as possible in the decision cycle is a start. This is one small way to help avoid UX becoming a downstream consideration.

Cool!

Exciting!!!!